Saturday, February 13, 2016

Adaptation and ADAPTATION: Foregrounding the Personal

I have just emerged from a quite remarkable panel at the Southwest Texas PCA Conference in
Albuquerque, USA. Last year I had been
blown away by a series of presentations given by high school learners that
proved beyond doubt that critical theories could be accessible to everyone so
long as they were sufficiently motivated.
I wrote about my experiences in a short essay now available in the
latest issue (No. 3) of Dialogue: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy (http://journaldialogue.org/issues/a-pedagogical-journey-albuquerque-2015/).

This year I was
part of a panel on adaptation theory. I
delivered a short presentation reworking some of my core beliefs in the future of
adaptation studies in light of comments made recently by a publisher
acquaintance of mine, interpreted through the prism of a visit made to the
Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque where the term “adaptation” was
specifically used as a term to describe cultural and spatial adjustment over
time. I summarized my ideas in a
presentation now accessible on http://www.slideshare.net/laurenceraw/can-adaptation-studies-survive.

What really blew
me away both intellectually and emotionally was a presentation given in the same
panel by Jillian St. Jacques of Oregon State University. I first encountered him last year, when he
also shared a panel with me about adaptation theory, and I was intrigued by the
freshness of his ideas, even if I did not necessarily agree with them (I did
not necessarily need to). For this year’s
panel St. Jacques had chosen to consider “adaptation” through the lens of his
own autobiography as someone born into a homophobic family, who had lived life
as a trans-sexual, and subsequently chosen to set aside that role and become a
family man instead.

With the aid of
photographs of his own life at various stages from adolescence through middle
age, coupled with incisive critical views mediated through Foucault and Judith
Butler, St. Jacques made me acutely aware of just how personal adaptation studies actually is. Whether we like it or not, that process of
coming to terms with our roles imposed on us in the societies we inhabit, and
trying to work through them, is fundamental to our existence, and one which
inevitably involves adaptation.

This might be a
controversial viewpoint to many who are either not involved in adaptation
studies, or those who are just beginning on their travels through
adaptation. What can the process of
transforming literary into cinematic texts, or other transformative processes
variously described as translation, transmediality or remediation have to do
with the kind of processes St. Jacques was referring to? The answer is everything and nothing. Any process of adaptation, as Jerome Bruner
once said, involves the construction of narratives;
these narratives are not just designed to be watched or listened to, but are
fundamental to the way we think. As we
go throughout life, these narratives are shaped and reshaped, but never
fixed. Adaptation is everything in the
sense that the term describes that process of shaping, but nothing in the sense
that we are in a perpetual state of uncertainty. We never know how long the narratives we
construct are going to last; and whether they will satisfy us in the present or
the future. This was the main thrust of
St. Jacques’s talk.

In more general
terms, St. Jacques also problematized some of the terms that are often not
sufficiently deconstructed in adaptation studies – for example, the ways in
which “masculinity” and “femininity” are perceived. A recent book written by Shelley Cobb has
taken a feminist take on authorship; in light of St. Jacques’s talk, we might
wonder what “feminist” authorship actually signifies. From a more ontological perspective, how do
we as individuals understand what being a “man” or “a woman” involves? Maybe we have to think of adaptation as a
complex process as we come to terms with ourselves as well as the worlds we
inhabit. Maybe that process is
never-ending: this is what I understood from St. Jacques’s piece.

More than ever I
realized how adaptation studies is a process of negotiation and re-negotiation;
and that this process takes precedence over all other processes associated with
the discipline such as translation, remediation or transmediality. This negotiation is both transnational and
transtextual; it not only determines how we reinterpret texts such as films,
books, or material online, but also how we, as personalities, are shaped and
reshaped by such texts as well as our encounters with others.

At the end of
St. Jacques’s presentation, I felt as if I had been hit by an intellectual
train; other participants were clearly emotionally shaken. As I write this, some three hours after St.
Jacques finished, I am still trying to come to terms with the implications of
what he proposed. I believe that
adaptive process will take some considerable time.

As usual, your posts are very stimulating and it is so nice to see how you really make a term as adaptation become alive, and you even show how this is part of our REAL life – we would not be alive without it… I do love the sentence: “Adaptation is a way of life, not just a textual process” Thanks and greetings from our group – GREAT!

I heard a great paper from my friend (and for awhile, fellow PhD student at Swansea) Alison Plant, who responded in a sense to the ideas you are bringing out here: she was talking about how personal sounds in radio drama are. When you hear that most stereotypical of SFX, a seagull's cry, do you actually think of "the seaside," which is what the aural shorthand is supposed to be? If so, what seaside do you see/imagine/mentally arrive at? It's extremely personal and will change throughout one's life.

Dear Laurence, great article on the unusual account of St. Jacques and how he (and you!) relate it to adaptation. When reading I recalled what happened to me last week: when I was 7 or 8, I had a toy truck I liked a lot. Never saw it again, but I came across it on a site of vintage toys. In my head, it was orange, but the one I saw it was grey. Actually the one I had was also grey. I was puzzled why it became orange in my head, after so many years having it only in my imagination. Somehow my memory underwent through a process of adaptation, after such a long time not seeing that toy. I believe it somehow simplistically might confirm your line: "we never know if narratives we construct are going to last". I really enjoyed the text!